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Review
Sly, review: superstar profile that punches below its weight
Sylvester Stallone's story is an extraordinary one, but this largely self-penned portrait is light on facts that we didn't already know
“You slur. Your eyes droop. Maybe you’ll be an extra.” With these critiques, Sylvester Stallone’s first acting auditions in New York were met, as he reveals in Sly, a more-or-less self-authored portrait. Only by picking up the pen could the young Stallone guarantee himself more than a bit part as a pomaded thug – one of those leather-jacket delinquents in biker gangs, but never the one who got the girl. Not until the life-changing, world-conquering Rocky (1976).
In the run-up, Stallone had already figured out the only possible gameplan to break this ceiling – to become an actor who wrote his own scripts, eventually directing them, too. (His first move in this direction was gaining an “additional dialogue” credit on the 1974 Brooklyn greaser drama Lords of Flatbush, opposite Henry Winkler.) Mistakenly in the doc, he gets called the first superstar to be a writer-director too – which would be news to Charlie Chaplin, surely. But his career path was still wildly unusual for any Hollywood icon of the late 20th century. Imagine Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis spending untold hours polishing their own scripts.
This film has slick if impersonal credentials – directed by Thom Zimny, known for previous docs on Elvis, Willie Nelson, and his Bruce Springsteen concert films. It’s a nostalgic exercise in burnishing the Stallone brand, with the star on screen half the time in new interviews, between a slew of clips and outtakes. (Quentin Tarantino, Arnie, Talia Shire and Stallone’s brother Frank also contribute.) It’s light on anything we don’t already know – or anything not snappily covered lately in the Stallone sections of Nick de Semlyen’s book The Last Action Heroes.
We romp swiftly through the critical backlash to Stallone’s post-Rocky flops, his seizing of the chance to direct Rocky II (1979) – John G. Avildsen didn’t like the script – and then onwards, into the bloody, bombastic 1980s, with the peak Stallone year of 1982, when both Rocky III and First Blood came out.
“My father was Rambo,” he succinctly summarises. Empathy with Vietnam vets made him reject that protagonist’s scripted death as too dispiriting, and push instead for hope and survival. In this decade of excess, he became the king of sequels, and upping the steroids for each one: come Rocky IV (1985), he took such a pounding from Dolph Lundgren that he went to hospital for nine days.
“Don’t ever watch the second half of a biography about a star,” he quips 20 minutes before the end. “Stay tuned for the fall.” So we get it: the ill-fated shift to comedy, the generic action flicks of the 1990s; a recovery with his solid acting in Cop Land (1997), commercial rebirth in The Expendables (2010) and so on. All that is here (bar Creed), but it’s a skim. There’s nothing candid at all on the death of his son Sage from a heart attack in 2012. In stray moments, he does talk touchingly enough about life flying past – but this otherwise maudlin experience feels like a better use of Sly’s time than ours.
15 cert, 96 min. Streaming on Netflix now